Thunder & Lightning

by Christopher Nuttall

  Unseen, he silently cried for what they had lost.

  * * *

  A KEW had impacted on the relief force, but they’d inflicted enough damage for the battlesuits to cut into the flank of the enemy force that had been attempting to bar their way, chasing them away from the egress route. The remaining battlesuits had left at once, just before a second KEW came down and shattered the remains of the interstate still further. Dazed, Fardell walked across the interstate and continued, running into the survivors of his unit through sheer chance. He hadn’t even noticed the effects of the KEW; his mind wasn’t functioning quite right.

  “Sir, are you okay?” O’Malley asked. The tone of his voice was becoming increasingly worried; Fardell couldn’t focus enough to realise what he was saying, let alone answer him as if he was asking an important question. It was important, he knew, and yet it was not important. “What happened to the others?”

  Fardell could only look at him bitterly. The roaring in his ears was making it hard to think. O’Malley realised something was wrong in that same instant; he snapped an order to two other battlesuits and they picked up Fardell, battlesuit and all, carrying him back towards the west. Darkness shimmered into existence in front of Fardell’s eyes; he wanted to faint, but somehow, something was preventing him from doing that. A part of his mind reminded him of the drug implants provided for every American soldier, dimming the pain and trying to keep him awake and aware in the middle of the battlezone.

  It wasn’t working; Fardell was on the verge of collapse.

  More explosions shattered the area as the aliens regrouped and pushed onwards. The order to retreat had been given, but there were thousands of human soldiers who never heard it; some of whom escaped on their own, others who stood and fought until the aliens crushed them from orbit, or on the ground. The battlesuits walked as quickly as they could towards an elusive safety; all they knew was that there would be somewhere where they could rest, recharge the suits, and find medical care for their wounded commander.

  As Fardell fell into darkness, the remains of the once-proud force stumbled away from the field of battle.

  They had lost.

  Chapter Forty-Two: Aftermath

  United States National Command Centre

  The President didn’t want to hear it, but there was no choice.

  “They kicked our asses,” General William Denny said. His voice was very grim; the only bright spot about the entire battle was that it had provided a chance to get some vital personnel out of the Washington complex before the aliens destroyed it… and the President suspected that his old friend would have preferred to die under tons of molten rock. General Harrison had remained in command long enough to coordinate the retreat, insofar as it could be coordinated, and then stepped outside and blown his brains out with a pistol. “We mauled them, but they defeated us.”

  The words hung in the air, just long enough to make the room uncomfortable.

  “We launched nearly two hundred thousand soldiers into combat,” Denny continued. His voice lacked any trace of accusation, but that somehow made it worse. “The first attacks went fairly well; we encountered alien forces, shot the hell out of them, and pushed on. The forces that had been infiltrated into Washington came up under the cover of the air strike – we lost the pilot and Shadow that carried out the attack, but he succeeded before he died – and launched their offensive. Several alien buildings were stripped at high speed and their contents carried down into the tunnel system.”

  He paused. “At that point, everything went to hell,” he continued. “The aliens pulled back, engaging our forces from orbit and launching counterattacks as they saw our forces falling back in places. Some parts of the line broke, Mr. President; the aliens simply crushed them hard enough to shatter them. Other parts were cut off from the remainder of our forces and bypassed, left alone for later; some of those units cut their way out and escaped. In short, as soon as the aliens had beaten off the Russian attack in space, we found ourselves under increasingly heavy assault.”

  He continued remorselessly: “The alien point defence was sufficient to stop over seventy percent of ground-to-ground missiles that we launched, along with roughly sixty percent of the long-range shells we fired before the guns were destroyed from orbit,” he said. “Only one out of thirty nukes found its target and it wasn't enough to prevent the defeat; whatever it hit – and we don’t know just how effective it actually was – did not prevent the aliens from counterattacking. Quite apart from the radical – and probably improvised – response in Washington, the aliens launched a series of infantry and armoured counterattacks that forced our units back. The aliens actually lunged towards some of our base camps; fortunately, we had some of our own armoured support dug in and we gave the aliens a few bloody noses of their own…”

  Cardona slapped the table hard enough to hurt. “Never mind the nuts and bolts,” he snapped. “What was the final result?”

  Denny didn’t look away. “We launched two hundred thousand soldiers into battle,” he said. “Around ten thousand came back, many brutally wounded or seriously disabled.”

  Cardona stared at him. Modern war was not often that costly in terms of life; the vast losses that the combatants of the Second World War had soaked up and kept going had been a thing of the past. New York’s destruction had cost around seven million people, but that had been an isolated incident. The aliens might have killed almost two billion humans, mainly by the asteroids… but somehow the loss of so many soldiers struck home in a way that the asteroid strikes had not. Nearly two million Americans served in the various armed forces; how high had their death toll been?

  Denny coughed. “That’s not an exact figure,” he said. “There are still units and isolated soldiers reporting back in, having slipped out of the alien-controlled regions under cover of night, or simply having punched their way out of the encirclement. There are also the soldiers who were taken prisoner… except we have a report that some surrendering soldiers were gunned down.”

  “No,” the President said simply.

  “It’s not clear what happened,” Denny admitted. “The reports, however, suggested that the aliens simply shot them in cold blood.”

  Cardona looked up at his Secretary of State. “What about the other attacks?”

  “The Russians killed one mothership and damaged a second,” Richardson said. “They lost eight out of nine spacecraft in the attack; the ninth was lucky and is currently boosting towards the asteroid belt as fast as it can move. Odds are they hurt the aliens badly in space; ground-based observations are unreliable, but it seems that the mothership vented one hell of a lot of atmosphere and perhaps even bodies before it disintegrated completely, while the other one was still in trouble when the fighting was coming to an end. That’s about the best news there is.

  “The other four alien outposts were all attacked,” she continued. “The assault in Egypt failed spectacularly; there were apparently coordination problems between European and Caliphate forces and they multiplied to the point where the aliens had a chance to move between them and destroy both forces in detail. The desert offers little cover for military activities and the alien KEW strikes tore up both sides pretty badly. The landing in southern France took more of a beating; the Europeans detonated at least two nukes in the area, but in the end they were beaten back by the aliens. The Russians launched a much larger nuclear strike; I think we can probably call that one a tactical draw, but as the cable seems to have been undamaged, the aliens came out ahead. The landings in India ended up like ours, but the Indians lost fewer people simply because they didn’t have as many soldiers to bring to bear in the first place.”

  She sighed. “The net result, Mr. President, is that a large portion of the world’s combat power has been destroyed and the space elevators are still largely intact. If they were damaged – and that is a possibility in the Russian landing zone – the aliens have started to repair them. There are very definite signs that the aliens are about t
o launch major ground offensives against the human forces remaining, the difference being that they will probably succeed and punch through to knock out at least the Caliphate and perhaps Europe. Have you seen their latest message?”

  Cardona nodded. “They’re offering to supply Helium-3 at a good rate and some asteroid metals, even goods from the factories we left in the Belt, to any nation that is prepared to accept their rule,” he said. The message had been transmitted a day before the fighting had begun; back then, they had dared to hope to bring the aliens to the bargaining table. “Can they actually do that?”

  “It depends on just how willing the moon is to supply them,” Admiral Oshiro said. He sighed; the President noted with a moment of annoyance that everyone seemed to be sighing around him these days. Oshiro’s face had grown longer as the news from the moon had come in; the USSF had lost several bases on the moon that might have been useful if the war had gone differently. “It is an interesting point; one of the moon’s main grievances against us was that the price of Helium-3 was permanently fixed… and although the alien price is a little higher, demand is going to be much lower because of the damage caused by the war. Of course, they will probably make a killing using space elevators; space transport used to be expensive, but if they can set one up anywhere on Earth…”

  Cardona could see the implications for himself. “Janet, is anyone going to take them up on that offer?”

  Janet Richardson hesitated, clearly reluctant to commit herself. “It’s hard to say, Mr. President,” she said, finally. “The remains of Japan and Korea have a desperate need for energy; they might well agree to the alien bargain, just to buy some time. Brazil was battered by tidal waves as well, but they have tried to remain independent of the Great Powers; it is possible that they might agree to the bargain. Israel is in the path of the alien offensive; they might sound the aliens out to discover what they’re offering. The Caliphate’s central government has been badly weakened; it’s possible that smaller states might make agreements with the aliens, or the Europeans, or the…”

  She shook her head. “I am fairly sure that there will be some takers,” she said. “The only question is which of the Great Powers is going to be the next one to disintegrate, or sell out to the aliens for the best terms they can get.”

  “There is one piece of good news,” General Denny said. The President looked up hopefully. “We captured a pair of aliens and transported them to a confinement facility near here. Their possessions went somewhere else; a fortunate decision as the research complex was hit by a KEW half an hour after the items got there. So far, there’s been no sign that the aliens are even aware that we have prisoners; I would have expected either a recovery mission or an offer of exchange.”

  “But they knew that some equipment had been recovered and they were able to trace it,” Richardson pointed out. “Doesn’t that prove that they know?”

  “Maybe,” Denny said. “The only good news is that we can now use these prisoners to try to unlock some of the mysteries surrounding the aliens.”

  * * *

  Warag – who was not sure if he still had a right to the title of Soldier-Infantry – examined the alien binding carefully with his sonar. He’d been terrified that the humans intended to try to set the bone, maybe even repair it, on their own, but they’d been smart enough to merely splint it and carry Warag into a truck, which had then carried them somewhere far, far away from the occupied zone. He’d been stripped naked by the humans, who’d taken every piece of equipment but his translator. Somehow, the humans had known that the translator was necessary… and that it couldn’t be used to track him down, or perhaps they had just calculated that his fellow Oghaldzon would hesitate before trying to kill him. Warag had hoped that a patrol would stumble across the human vehicle and rescue him, but instead the vehicle had sped on… and he had blacked out. On awakening, he had found himself in this room with bright lights… and a firmly locked door.

  It had taken him only moments to fill the room with his sonar and realise there was definitely no way out. His sonar echoed back completely, a sign there was no way out of the walls, which were far too hard for him to kick down, even with his strong hindleg. The humans hadn’t chained him up or anything like that; he wondered grimly if they hadn’t bothered because they knew he was not a threat, or because they didn’t know anything about securing an adult Oghaldzon. It wasn’t an easy thing to do.

  He tried, cautiously, to stand up; the broken foreleg hurt badly but he could walk, as long as he remained very careful. The pain had faded, or perhaps he’d just gotten used to it; there were only small jabs of pain as he shuffled around. His sonar told him that the bandages the humans had wrapped around his body were trying to hold the blood in; Oghaldzon evidently healed cuts and bruises slower than humans. By now, he was sure, the damage would have healed, but he left the bandages in place anyway, just in case. He heard a faint sound and sensed the door opening through his sonar; he reached out with it, only to feel the presence of another small room, just like his own… and a human, standing and facing him. His sonar swept over the human; two frontal projections, no strange breeding organ hanging down between the legs… he was looking at a human female.

  “Hello,” the human said. “Can you understand me?”

  Warag thought, just for a moment, of remaining silent, but there was no point. The humans knew that he had his translator. “Yes,” he said, carefully. Human recordings showed a wide range of possible treatment of captives… although he doubted that even a human would want to sexually abuse his body. “I understand you.”

  The human’s lips twisted into a smile. “I am Doctor Laura Bryophyte,” she said. “I have been assigned to study you and ensure that you return to full health as quickly as possible. What is your name?”

  “Warag,” Warag said. He didn’t give the occupation and location parts of his title; he had a suspicion that before long he would become Warag-Prisoner-Humans, if he wasn’t there already. Second and third names changed with rank and position. “I think I am pleased to meet you.”

  The human shrugged. “Your people don’t know you’re here,” she said. “Most of our people don’t know you’re here; they might want to come take a little revenge on you for wives and children lost on the day you landed. How do your people treat prisoners of war?”

  Warag had to think about it; it had been so long since any war had included prisoners. “Most prisoners are kept secure until the war ends,” he said. Honesty might be his only defence. “Those deemed to be infected with… mind poison… are kept permanently until they die; they are treated well, but they are never allowed back into the general population. Those who were… misguided… were generally allowed back into the general population after the war ended and they realised the error of their ways.”

  Laura’s face twisted again. “And what will happen to the humans your people took prisoner here?”

  “The same,” Warag said. He repeated himself, finding it hard to talk for a moment; the injuries had been worse than he had supposed. “They will either be treated well or released after the war.”

  “Some of your people killed surrendering humans,” Laura said. Warag wished he knew how a human showed that he or she was lying; there had to be some way to tell with sonar. “Why would that happen?”

  Warag was appalled. “That would only happen if some isolated soldiers broke down under the pressure of the fighting,” he said, truthfully. The Oghaldzon were never comfortable discussing ThrillKill, but he was at the mercy of the human female; she could make him talk just by reaching out and pulling at one of his wounds. “The higher command would stop it before it spread into the other soldiers.”

  Laura shrugged. “We don’t know much about your kind,” she said. “Perhaps you will help us to learn?”

  It took Warag a moment to realise that it was a question. “I will tell you everything I know about our people,” he said. There hadn’t been much in the way of direction if one fell into human han
ds, but they had included instructions to explain the purpose of the war and how much better life would be if the human race surrendered without further bloodshed. “What do you want to know?”

  Laura shrugged again. “How do your weapons work?”

  Warag waved one hand in an irritated gesture. “I don’t know,” he said. He had never studied engineering, or more than the basics behind laser weapons, only their applications in tactical combat. It was the same for the next handful of technology-related questions; the only detail he really knew was that the translator had been based on human broadcasts emitting from Earth, after the different languages had been sorted out and a proper vocabulary had been built up. “I'm just a soldier.”

  “I see,” Laura said. She paused, just long enough for Warag to get nervous. “You are injured, but we have to examine you to find out how your bodies work… are you male or female?”

  “Male,” Warag said. It wasn't a matter of great interest. “Why do you want to know?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Laura said, at once. “I have to take you into the examination room. Will you be able to walk or do you want me to summon a team to carry you?”

  “I want to walk,” Warag said. It would give him an opportunity to see how much he could do with his damaged leg. Besides, being carried by a human was difficult and more than a little painful. “I’m ready when you are.”

  The human made a strange noise. Only later did he realise that it was human laughter. “Follow me,” she said, as the door opened. Warag followed her into a second room, and then a corridor that stretched further than his sonar could reach. He sensed, almost at once, the presence of another Oghaldzon, tasting her mating scent in the air. He didn’t recognise the smell, but that meant nothing; the fighting would have continued regardless of a female coming into season. “Are you all right?”